Book Break is travelling the world today, we have come to Japan!
To explore the world of Japanese literature.
Why is it so beloved in the West? And what sets it apart?
Because writers from Haruki Murakami to Banana Yoshimoto to Yukio Mishima have these cult
followings in the West.
And even writers who write in English like Kazuo Ishiguro still have this very distinct
style.
Ishiguro said that growing up in a Japanese family but living in England was really crucial
to his writing, because it gave him a different way of seeing the world to his peers.
Of course, there is such a wealth of Japanese literature, with such a long history, that
it's completely impossible to generalise it into any one style, anything that makes Japanese
literature what it is.
But I've been looking at a lot of different Japanese books, and I think you will find
some themes running through them, like perhaps a more philosophical approach than many Western
books.
And more of a focus on beauty in all its different forms.
Lots of the books are very descriptive, but with very simple, quite lyrical language.
Many of them can be very dark, which is perhaps the stereotype of Japanese literature.
But all of the books I've read have been just incredibly nuanced, the types of books you
want to read over and over again just to begin to understand their depths.
So as I mentioned, Japanese literature has an incredibly long and illustrious history.
So I thought let's start by going all the way back to the beginning, to probably the
most famous classic to come out of Japan, the Tale of Genji,
which dates all the way back to the 11th century, and was written by a woman.
So the Tale of Genji was written by a lady in waiting, named Murasaki Shikibu, though
there are some debates about how much of it she actually wrote herself.
And it took quite a long while for the book to become quite so popular as it is today,
because it was originally written in archaic language, and also in a very poetic style,
which made it really difficult for the average modern Japanese reader to decipher.
So it wasn't until the early 20th century that it was first fully translated into modern
Japanese, and then from there could be translated into other languages.
So the story follows Hikaru Genji, who is removed from the line of succession by his
emperor father, and demoted to be a commoner.
And the story follows his career path and his romantic exploits.
And it's considered by some to be the first ever novel, so it's really an amazing one
to look into.
So that's a great place to start, because it's arguably the birth of modern literature.
But now I'm going to jump all the way forward to one of the most recent Japanese bestsellers,
Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata.
So this one is about a woman who doesn't fit in to society's expectations of her.
She's perfectly content with her life, other than being aware that her family are always
worrying about her.
She loves her job working at the convenience store, where she's worked for 18 years, and
while she's there she pays close attention to the dress codes and speech patterns of
people around her
so that she can adopt them and act normal.
So it's quite reminiscent of Eleanor Oliphant, and it offers up this really amusing insight
into society's expectations and the pressure to conform
as well as this kind of questioning of what is or isn't considered normal
And for people who've never been to Japan, it's a really interesting look at the convenience
store, which is totally different from anything we have over here, and seems to play such
a big role in daily life in Japan.
A book that I'm half way through reading at the moment and loving is Before the Coffee
Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi.
So this is a really fun quirky book, about a time travelling cafe in Tokyo.
Where customers have the ability to go back in time, but there's all sorts of rules that
go with that, and one of the main ones being they must return to the present before their
cup of coffee gets cold.
So in the book we meet four different customers, all on different missions to revisit something
from their past.
And it's kind of a musing on what would we do differently in our lives, and what do we
ever actually have the power to change.
Now I've got two books with the word 'cat' in the title, starting with The Guest Cat
by Takeshi Hiraide.
So this is about a couple in their mid-thirties, living in Tokyo, and working as freelance
writers.
And they've slowly found that they have very little to say to each other anymore.
Until one day, a neighbour's cat wonders into their house, and into their lives, and it's
a very sweet, short book, about the effect that this cat has on the couple.
Slowly drawing them away from their work and out into the garden, where they're able to
reconnect with the world and with nature and rediscover the beauty in the world.
And then my other cat-themed book is If Cats Disappeared From the World by Genki Kawamura.
So this one is about a young man who receives a terminal diagnosis, and finds that he only
has about a week left to live.
And then the devil appears, and offers him up a deal, where he can gain an extra day
of life if each day he picks something, or agrees to something, to vanish from the world.
So for example the first one that's picked is phones.
Phones just cease to exist as if they never did.
And so each day, we see a new thing vanish from the world, and it's, again, a very philosophical
book, about him musing on his relationship to those items, and how those items impacted
his relationships to other people.
And it's about him slowly realising what he wants his place in the world to be.
And it's all about the pain and beauty of mortality.
It's a really lovely book.
Now a Japanese writer who's had a huge cultural impact on the West is Marie Kondo.
She wrote The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, which is the book that started a tidying
revolution over here, with people throwing away all the items that didn't spark joy for
them anymore.
Put the hands up emoji below if you have Marie Kondo'd your house because I feel like we
all have.
So inspired by that, she went on to write The Life-Changing Manga of Tidying Up.
Which is a lovely, fictional, graphic novel, all about a young woman who transforms her
home, work life, and love life, all using these kinds of tidying methods.
And we haven't heard the last of her yet, because coming up next year, she's got a new
lifestyle book, which is all about transforming your work life.
So keep your eyes peeled for more news on that.
Now two books I wanted to mention here are books not written by Japanese authors and
not originally written in Japanese, but I wanted to mention them to show other ways
in which Japan has had such a massive cultural impact on the West.
So these are two books written by Western authors, but inspired by their travels through
Japan.
So first, there's Kaizen, by Sarah Harvey, which is everything that Sarah Harvey learned
while living in Tokyo about the Japanese philosophy of kaizen, which essentially means good change.
So kaizen is all about making step by step, little changes to improve your life, and being
really kind and gentle with yourself along the way.
And being patient and not giving up.
And it's been used for a long time in Japan in a management context
And has actually been shown to make, for example, Japanese factories, much more productive.
So in her book, Sarah Harvey writes all about what she learned about kaizen, and also how
she saw it being applied to people's personal lives, and what we in the West could really
learn from that.
And another love letter to Japan is Anna Sherman's The Bells of Old Tokyo.
So this is all about how before Japan adopted Western time, the bells of Edo, which was
the old Tokyo, ran people's lives.
Then Japan switched to Western time, and all of that was lost.
So in this book, Anna Sherman goes on a journey to visit the places where the bells once rang.
And along the way, she meets a myriad of fascinating characters, and listens to them and learns
their stories.
So it's a really interesting exploration of Japanese culture and history, and travelling
in time.
So those are all the books I'm going to mention in this video, otherwise we'll be here literally
all day if I try and talk about the entirety of Japanese literature.
But there are so many more to explore if you're interested.
I didn't even get to talk about Japanese classics like the Sea of Fertility series, or there's
a book Snow Country which is this doomed love story by Yasunari Kawabata, who was the first
Japanese person to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Or there are the very famous, very violent novels, by Ryu Murakami, there are just so
many more to explore.
So on that note, please do leave a comment below, letting me know your favourite Japanese
books, and then we can all swap recommendations.
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Coming up next week, we are celebrating National Poetry Day.
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See you next time!